XR Unleashed: The Future of Reality Tech

When Christian Mühlroth wanted to visualize furniture in his home, he tried the obvious route: augmented reality. Then he went back to Photoshop. Cutting out furniture and placing it over a photograph of the room was simply easier. For a conversation about the future of extended reality, it is a useful starting point. A technology can promise a more immersive experience and still lose to a familiar workaround.

In this 2023 episode of Innovation Rockstars, Jana Uthayakumar, Global Foresight, Data & Analytics Lead at Ericsson ConsumerLab, explores that gap between technical possibility and everyday adoption. His research combines consumer behavior, expert interviews and technological developments. For R&D leaders, the interesting question is how to recognize a worthwhile application before enthusiasm for the technology starts doing the thinking for them.

Start with the inconvenience people already recognize

Uthayakumar sees opportunities for XR beyond gaming and entertainment. Navigation, translation and help with ordinary tasks could give people reasons to use it repeatedly. Living in Sweden without speaking the language, he has found Google Lens useful when he needs a translation. The value arrives in a recognizable situation, without requiring him to reorganize his life around a new device.

At the time of the conversation, he expects smartphones and XR devices to coexist, with different strengths. A phone suits an unplanned moment out in the world. Glasses can offer immersion and avoid the fatigue of holding a phone in front of your face. Neither form factor wins every use case.

That distinction matters for product development. Before asking which device will dominate, ask when someone would choose this experience over what they already do. Mühlroth's furniture example is a reminder that a feature demonstration and a useful routine are different tests.

Include the person who never bought the device

The adoption question also extends beyond the wearer. XR devices can collect images of their surroundings. Combine those inputs with AI, and a person nearby may become part of an experience they did not choose.

Uthayakumar raises the discomfort of talking to someone wearing AR glasses, especially if an assistant might be analyzing the conversation. Better hardware cannot resolve that discomfort by itself. Social acceptance and privacy belong in the research, alongside convenience and technical performance.

Tourism offers another uncertainty. A virtual visit might replace a trip, encourage one, or help someone revisit memories afterward. He describes a colleague exploring a destination in VR after returning from it. Rather than claiming a single outcome for the tourism economy, he leaves room for these different behaviors. Foresight has to investigate them before a business treats one as inevitable.

Build a view from several kinds of evidence

ConsumerLab's approach brings together expert interviews, primary research, social and media trends, and perspectives from people developing hardware and software. Consumer interest needs to be considered alongside what the technology can realistically deliver.

There is also a historical resource: accumulated studies showing how attitudes and behavior changed as earlier technologies spread. Looking back at smartphone adoption can reveal needs that existed before the devices serving them. That helps researchers separate a persistent human motivation from enthusiasm for a particular product.

“All you can do is reduce the uncertainty of the foresight based on numerous sources of information.”

This is also a collaborative process. Research topics emerge through conversations with customers and colleagues across research, business units and marketing. Proposals then go back to stakeholders for input. The research team develops the inquiry, while those discussions help keep it relevant to decisions inside the company.

Give the business a wider set of possibilities

Uthayakumar points to ConsumerLab's 2019 study of 5G consumer potential as an example. Much of the industry's early discussion emphasized enterprise applications, including manufacturing and mining. His team investigated consumer use cases across areas such as automotive, communication and entertainment, including possibilities beyond what people were doing at the time.

He describes the contribution as broadening the conversation within Ericsson and equipping colleagues for discussions with customers and the industry. He does not claim that one study produced a particular commercial result. Its value was in helping the organization consider opportunities an enterprise-centered narrative could overlook.

That is a useful expectation for foresight: evidence that changes the questions a business is willing to ask, with a clear route to the people asking them.

More scenarios still need better judgment

Uthayakumar sees generative AI helping researchers develop ideas, consider methods, analyze material and adapt insights for different stakeholders. He also imagines immersive simulations that could make a possible future easier to explore. These are opportunities to investigate, rather than proof that an AI-generated scenario will be credible.

A colleague's experience captures the limitation. Experimenting with image generation, she accumulated thousands of images and ended up with too many choices. The capacity to produce more had created another decision problem.

“Just because you can generate a high volume of scenarios in an instant doesn't mean it's better.”

Researchers still need to assess relevance and work backward through the conditions a scenario would require. Speed does not remove that responsibility.

Asked for his own Innovation Rockstar moment, Uthayakumar chooses something more modest than an immersive future: automating localized research reports. He wrote a script to update charts and parts of the text that colleagues had previously edited manually across many markets. People could then spend more time understanding the findings and adding local insight. For all the possibilities discussed in the episode, that achievement has a satisfyingly practical appeal: less repetitive work, more room to think.